Olivia的阅读小分队日记

olivia瓜瓜

越障- 2--6

   Obama vs. Cantor: Tempers Flare As DebtCeiling Negotiations Take a Dramatic Turn
President Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor engaged in ahigh stakes test of wills at Wednesday’s debt ceiling negotiations in the WhiteHouse, trading dramatic ultimatums in the most intense round of talks yet. Withtempers boiling over, Cantor took his grievances public in an unprecedentedpress conference after Obama issued a veto threat and told the Republicanlawmaker he’d had “enough.”
The meeting began normallyenough, with Obama welcoming the eight congressional leaders from both partiesto the White House. He made opening remarks and then called on Cantor. Cantorgriped that the number figure in cuts has been shrinking since last week. LastThursday – when Obama and House Speaker John Boehner proposed a grand bargainthat Cantor helped bring down two days later in the face of a revolt from theright  – the President had offered $1.7 trillion in savings, Cantor said,as a baseline of agreement.
After the failure of the big $4.5trillion deal, Cantor took over the negotiations for House Republicans.Suspiciously, he said, the baseline started shrinking. “When we were thereyesterday somehow the number became 1.6 to 1.7 to 1.8,” Cantor said he told thePresident. “So all of a sudden we are now drifting further downward and todaywe now look to be below $1.4 trillion.” Democratic sources say the number,which came from the talks led by Biden — talks that collapsed when Cantorwalked away from them two weeks ago — hasn’t changed. It has always been$1.5 trillion as a base with an additional $200 billion in health care savingsthat Republicans wanted and that the Administration had agreed to push for withcongressional Democrats.
But Cantor wasn’t done. Not onlywas the baseline number shrinking, he said, but the details had changed: theWhite House wanted $80 billion in Medicare spending and another $50 billion tofix the dual eligible problem in the Prescription Drug Program. “That’ssomething we never agreed to in the Biden talks,” Cantor said.
The President replied that thoughthe White House still advocated for the $1.7 trillion figure, House and Senate Democratscould not support it, especially without revenue increases. The President addedthat the new conditions also came from congressional Democrats. “Maybe theyought to get it straight and see if they can get to $1.7 trillion,” Cantor toldreporters in an unprecedented press conference outside of House votes in theSpeakers Lobby after the White House meeting. Listen to it here:
Giventhat the two sides are so far apart – House Republicans have long demanded thevalue of any increase to the federal borrowing limit be offset by deficitreductions, and it will take at least a $2.4 trillion hike to get through 2012— Cantor offered to back off his insistence that there be only one debt ceilingvote. (Some context: up until this point House leadership aides had alwayssaid that the reason they were resistant to Senate Minority Leader MitchMcConnell’s suggestion of multiple votes is because they knew more than onevote would never pass their conference — ie, they didn’t consider it aconcession, but a necessity.) “And so, I said, ‘Really, Mr. President, ifyou look at where we are right now we are very far apart,” Cantor toldreporters. “And if you want the full $2.4 trillion increase and you won’t signanything else, I don’t know if we can get there. And so, I said I was willingto come off of my insistence that there be one vote that perhaps we could avoiddefault. That’s when he got very agitated.”
Democratic sources coming out ofthe meeting allege that Cantor rudely interrupted the President three times –an accusation Cantor’s staff hotly disputes (“Eric waits to be recognizedbefore speaking to the President,” says Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring).Democratic sources say that it was the third interruption that sparked thePresident’s temper.
The following paraphrased accountof what President Obama said next is cobbled together from Democratic andRepublican sources:
What we’re seeing here confirmswhat the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone ismore interested in posturing and political positioning and protecting theirbase than solving real problems. Eric, I could get well above the numbersthe GOP is talking about with revenue increases.  I am not afraid to vetothis and I will take that message and defend it to the American people. If wedefault, it will be a tax increase on every American. My responsibility is tothe American people. I have reached the point where I say, ‘Enough.’ I have sathere long enough and no other President – Ronald Reagan wouldn’t sit here likethis. I’ve reached my limit. We’ve reached the point where something’s gotto give. You’ve either got to compromise on your dollar for dollar insistenceor you compromise on the big deal, which means raising taxes. Eric, don’t callmy bluff. I will go to the American people on this. This may bring mypresidency down, but I will not yield on this.
According to Cantor, Obama thenshoved back his chair and stormed out of the room. Democrats present at themeeting said there was no shoving or storming involved, he simply got up andsaid, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I was somewhat taken abackbecause, you know, I was compromising,” Cantor told reporters. A Democraticsource involved in the talks scoffed at Cantor’s “compromise.” “We’re not abanana republic,” the source said. “We’re not going to deal with this everythree to six months. If you think it’s hard now imagine how hard it’ll be inthe middle of an election.”
The episode illustrates how farapart the two sides remain, even as the nation stands at the brink. Butperhaps almost as troubling is Cantor’s litigation of this tension in thepress. I have never seen negotiations broadcast so openly. It’s not a goodsign. For every major successful bill I’ve covered on the Hill — Medicare PartD, the Bush tax cuts, the 2005 energy bill, CAFTA, the pension overhaul, TARP,the stimulus and health care reform — the principals always came out of theroom and said, ‘We’re making progress,’ or ‘Nice try, but I’m not going tonegotiate with you,’ or even, ‘I’m not going to negotiate with myself.’
An agreement on raising the debtceiling will not come from winning a spin war. If talks collapse, both sideswill be blamed and whatever they’re saying now really won’t matter much inthe face of economic disaster. The only solution at this point is to bite thebullet and draft a deal everyone is unhappy with. And the more public theprocess is – both for Cantor and the President – the harder it will become toreach a deal behind closed doors. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting the storyas much as the next reporter. And if something big happens, we usually findout. But when talks blow up there’s a real risk: if negotiators can’t trusteach other not to snipe in the press, how can they trust each other to joinarms and enact something as painful as deficit reduction?

8分20S

olivia瓜瓜

【速度2-5】


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Gay Marriage Fight Sparks US Debate Over Meaning of Marriage
Peter Fedynsky | New York City
July 05, 2011
Rhode Island on Saturday adopted a law legalizing same-sex civil unions. The week before, New York became the sixth American state to allow the marriage of two men or two women. Twenty-nine states have passed constitutional amendments banning homosexuals from marrying. Proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage are struggling to define the very meaning of marriage.
Four-year-old Ian was adopted at birth by Dan Gallagher and Peter Shearer, homosexuals who have lived together in what they describe as a loving relationship for 14 years.? Gallagher explains his understanding of marriage. "For me, it's the outward expression of a commitment between two people; that the couple then has a vested interest in expressing their feeling toward each other, and showing that to others," he said.

Gays and lesbians celebrated passage of New York's gay marriage law with an impromptu rendition of a 1964 pop song, Chapel of Love.

Ali Annunziato plans to marry her female partner next year. "I am going to enjoy my civil liberty as a woman to get married to a woman because I can and because I am in love and I should be able to do that," she said.

Many religious institutions, however, oppose gay marriage. New York's Roman Catholic bishops issued a statement saying society must regain a true understanding of the meaning and the place of marriage. Monsignor Kieran Harrington, vicar of communications for the Brooklyn Diocese, says the state should not be the arbiter of who loves whom and what affection is.
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"The concern of the state should be procreation, the bringing in of children into the world and to ensure that those children are raised in stable families. That's the role of the state, because that's the benefit to the state. That's why the state confers benefits to married couples," he said.

Dan Gallagher and Peter Shearer say they try to provide Ian with a loving and stable home. Both say homosexual couples deserve such rights as health benefits, visitation and inheritance rights. But Shearer does not believe children are the primary criterion for marriage, noting that even some heterosexual couples cannot have any. "Me wearing a wedding ring to work and people knowing that I'm gay, it changes their understanding of what gay couples are from what may be an unfair bias to something that's more reality based. I think it can actually lead to greater tolerance, so it actually even promotes a more civil society," he said.

New York's Catholic bishops said in their statement that the church will always treat its homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love. But Monsignor Harrington says gay marriage represents a further erosion of the institution of marriage that is already troubled by widespread divorce, cohabitation, children born out of wedlock and, indeed, sexual scandals within the church itself. He says failure of the state to maintain the ideal standard of marriage is a mistake.

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"I think we can hold the ideal as, ‘this is what we should be holding up as the ideal, this is what the state should be supporting, and then there can be other circumstances that can be less than ideal, and the state can sometimes recognize that there are less than ideal states [circumstances]," he said.

President Barack Obama spoke recently at a White House reception for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month. "You're fighting for the idea that everyone ought to be treated equally and everybody deserves to be able to live and love as they see fit," he said.

What the president did not say is that he supports same sex civil unions, but not gay marriage. Political observers say he could risk alienating many voters by favoring gay marriage.

People on both sides of the issue agree that Ian deserves a loving home. The difficulty is reconciling the definition of marriage. The religious view of many is that marriage has throughout history been a place where the miracle of life takes place. Proponents of gay marriage say recognition of homosexual love represents social progress.


Flying Car Moves Closer to Reality
This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.
You could fill the sky withall the ideas people have had for flying cars -- or what Carl Dietrich calls"flying-driving vehicles."

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CARLDIETRICH: "Since the turn of the twentieth century, there have been manyhundreds of published concepts for flying-driving vehicles. And some of themhave actually been built and flown. But at this point the Transition is theclosest to actually getting to the marketplace.”
Carl Dietrichheads a company in Massachusetts called Terrafugia.

CARL DIETRICH:"Terrafugia is developing the Transition street-legal airplane, which manypeople have characterized as the first practical flying car. And the Transitionis designed to really be a general aviation airplane, like a Cessna or a Piper,a propeller-powered airplane that can fold up its wings, drive down the roadand park in a single-car garage.”

He says the Transition Roadable Aircraft easily changes to a car.
CARL DIETRICH: "It takes about twenty seconds. It’s likeputting the top down on a convertible, only instead of folding up your roof,we’re folding up our wings and we’re transferring power from a propeller to thewheels for driving on the ground.”
Development began in two thousand six, and the first road andfight tests took place in two thousand nine.

The Transition had to meet federal safety standards for cars andaircraft. Last year the Federal Aviation Administration agreed to let it weighmore than other light sport aircraft. But even fully loaded, says Mr. Dietrich,it still weighs about half as much as an average car.
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IThe windows, for example, weigh less than traditional automotivesafety glass. Terrafugia got permission for that last month from the NationalHighway Traffic Safety Administration.Carl Dietrich says the aircraft can climb to more than threethousand meters. It can carry two people at speeds over one hundred sixtykilometers an hour in the air. And on the ground it can drive at highwayspeeds, around one hundred thirteen kilometers an hour.
The plane needs an airport for takeoffs and landings, but it usesautomotive gasoline.

The company expects to complete the building process for itsflying cars within the next few months. Then it will began an intensiveyear-long testing program. Terrafugia expects the Transition to reach market bythe end of twenty-twelve, at a price of around two hundred fifty thousanddollars.
Carl Dietrich says nearly one hundred people have already signedup as buyers. He hopes to sell as many as a thousand a year in the near future.
CARL DIETRICH: "That will not have any appreciable ornoticeable impact on the air traffic control infrastructure in the foreseeablefuture today. Now, twenty years down the road, who knows?"

And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report,written by June Simms. You can watch a flight test of the Transition at http://www.hxen.com . And how do you feel about flyingcars? Write to us at http://www.hxen.com . I’m Steve Ember.
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第一篇：差两行第二篇：差一行
第三篇：56S
第四篇：差一行
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好困啊 啊啊啊

olivia瓜瓜

越障2-4  

Botanists shred paperwork in taxonomy reformsDescriptions of new plant species can now be published electronically.
Daniel Cressey
The requirement for new plant species to be described in print may soon be lifted.Images.com/Corbis
Botanists will soon be able to name new plant species without ever physically printing a paper, as the code governing botanical taxonomy undergoes a major shake-up.
At the ongoing International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Melbourne, Australia, researchers have agreed to drop the requirement for hard copies of papers describing new species. Also vanishing from the code is a requirement that species must come with a Latin description.
Although the amendments voted through today by the IBC's nomenclature section will have to be ratified by the full congress on 30 July, this is expected to be a formality. The changes are likely to come into effect from 1 January next year, when the new International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) is likely to come into force.
"I would not necessarily describe the decision as a move away from hard copy except in so far as all scientific publication is moving away from hard copy," says John McNeill, a researcher at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK, in an e-mail to Nature. McNeill is attending the Melbourne meeting.
"It is simply a recognition that electronic publication is now an important component of scientific communication and that that communication should include the publication of the names of new taxa (species etc.) and of other taxonomic and nomenclatural actions and changes."
Under the existing ICBN, any description of a new species must be declared by "distribution of printed matter". This has long been a controversial issue, but an attempt to change the code at the last congress in Vienna six years ago floundered, mainly because of concerns that archiving of electronic documents would not necessarily be permanent.
Although the use of an 'archival standard' PDF for electronic publication is not mandatory in the proposed code, progress in journal archiving has reduced concerns over the permanence issue, says McNeill.
Short cut to a shake-upLast year, Sandra Knapp of London's Natural History Museum came up with a way around the existing rule on printed matter. She published descriptions of four new species in a paper in the online-only journalPLoS ONE and sent printouts to ten libraries around the world (see'Linnaeus meets the Internet').
Mark Watson, also at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden and secretary of the IBC special committee on electronic publication, says that Knapp's efforts really focused the community on the issue. If other botanists had followed suit, libraries might have ended up with many individual taxonomic papers to be archived. That might not have been the best result, but is well within the rules, he notes.
Of the new rules, Watson says, "It will be far easier and quicker to publish things. It will also make a huge difference in availability of those things."
The move away from Latin is also causing a buzz in the community. Species will still need a Latin name, but the requirement for a short description in Latin has now been dropped.
"About time too," says Watson, who points out that translation into Latin is not necessarily easy for researchers in countries such as Nepal and China, where he does much of his work.
Playing catch-upNow the pressure is on zoologists to catch up with their botanical brethren. Their equivalent of the ICBN — the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) — still demands paper publications. Proposals to amend the code were published in 2008 and have been widely discussed, but no firm action has been taken.

Mike Taylor, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, UK, says that the ICZN code is hugely valuable and acknowledges that amending it is a difficult process.
But, he notes, "The credibility of the whole code at the moment is called into question because people are ignoring [this rule]. The way it looks to me is the world has moved on and left the code behind."

4分钟。。。晚安

olivia瓜瓜

速度 2-4

Column:Evolve (Again)
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter


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My latest digital vision is Giiiggle, asocial network. Giiiggle’s smartphone app creates bubbly laughs. Its searchengine puts joyous results first. It mines postings to find smileys, autoeditsentries to remove gloom and negativity, and rates people by their laughterquotient. In a troubled world, Giiiggle will get big everywhere fast. You knowit’s good because it’s being created in a dorm room. If you want to invest,I’ll scribble some numbers on the back of an envelope...
Despite claims by digital evangelists thatthe internet had rewritten the rules about business cycles, the dot-com bubbleburst a decade ago. Back then, companies and investors sometimes allowedexuberance or panicked bandwagon-jumping to drive out business sense. Now it’sdéjà vu all over again. Frenzy over social networks and interactive media canproduce equally overhyped predictions that everything will change, not tomention money-losing investments in silly ventures.

Separating enduring strategic lessons fromthe hype can help avoid a new crash. Hint: The lessons don’t include rushing tofund start-ups on the basis of back-of-the-envelope calculations. The tools arechanging, but not the rules about change.

Empowering young people continues to beimportant. Fresh thinking comes from fresh sources. High-potential venturesstarted on college campuses include custom-built personal computers in the1980s (Michael Dell, the University of Texas, Austin), internet portals in the1990s (Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford), and social networks in the 2000s(Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard). Within companies, young employees are enthusiasticexplorers. Encouraging self-organizing networks to let them investigatewhatever they want to through company channels can produce new business ideas,as IBM found in the early days of virtualization. When talented employees leaveto start ventures, smart companies keep them in the family through seed-capitalinvestments or alumni groups.

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Continuous evolution protects against bloodyrevolution. New technologies don’t disrupt all at once. Radio evolved tocoexist with television. The death of newspapers has been proclaimed for 20years; while some chains have died, others have become multimedia informationproviders, shedding or converting legacy assets such as printing plants.Without abandoning the old, companies can play with the new. IBM was fasterthan HP or Dell to emphasize services; it sold its PC business, yet stayed withmainframes and continued investing in supercomputing, eventually creatingWatson, the Jeopardy-winning “thinking” computer. Innovation-seekingcompanies that miss one bandwagon can improve their offerings and lead thenext. Verizon lost the first Apple iPhone deal to AT&T but now sells itsversion of the iPhone, along with Google’s Android, and has superior LTEtechnology.

Companies that don’t evolve have believedtheir press, clinging to the business models that got them to the top. The headof a technology company that dominates its market confessed to me thatengineers and managers are so enamored of their success that they shut outideas incompatible with the current model. But experiments with other models,whether internal or with partners, provide experience and readiness for futurechange. Learning from partners, or from corporate venture capital investments,is a strategic capability.

Each technology wave produces tools that aremore accessible, user-friendly, and democratizing than their predecessors,blurring the line between amateurs and professionals; think of real-time streetvideos of news events. But history shows that commercial interests soon takeover tools of the people. And some establishments can be remarkably imperviousto bottom-up disruption because of their organizational structures orgovernment regulation. In education and health care, numerous demonstrationsshow the transformational power of technology, but the overall systems changeslowly and haven’t reached a tipping point.

Maybe change resisters need Giiiggle. It’s ajoke, of course. But if you want to invest, I’ll send you an envelope...

Media Lab maverick

Joi Ito takes his Silicon Valley venture-capital savvy to MIT’sMedia Lab.
By Andrew Clark
Photography by Sam Ogden
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/1108/arts_sciences/media-lab-maverick.shtml

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While his peers were learning algebra, Joichi “Joi” Ito was the kid in junior high school alreadyworking on his career. “By the time I was 13, I was learning how to operate BBSand X.25 networks,” says Ito, X’90, who was born in Japan and grew up in theDetroit suburbs before moving back to Tokyo during his middle-school years.Fast-forward 30 years to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in April Ito was namedthe new director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

It’s a job well suited to Ito, even if he’s an unusual hire for MIT.Enrolling first at Tufts (computer science) and then spending a year as aphysics major at Chicago, he left college before completing his degree. "Ionce asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I couldunderstand it more intuitively," Ito later wrote. "He said, ‘Youcan’t understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you’ll get the rightanswer.’ That was it for me.”

He taught himself computer science when it “wasn’t formalized in education,”says Ito. “I immersed myself in different projects where I had to learn thetechnology. Basically it was like learning the stuff off the street.”

It may have been nontraditional, but Ito’s self-education worked. He hasbecome a pop star in the world of digital technology, earning a nod as one ofthe 25 Most Influential People on the Web by Business Week in 2008.

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A strong believer in the "open" web, that the Internet should be aplace where users share content, Ito was an early blogger, publishing onjoi.ito.com/weblog since 1993. He also has been an adviser at Twitter, anearly-stage investor in Flickr, and cofounder of Digital Garage. “His CV readslike a history of the web,” writes Dave Lee in a July 2010 BBC story.

Until this past March, Ito was CEO of Creative Commons, a company thatprovides copyright licenses and tools to promote sharing in the digital community.“I came on with the company early on, with the goal of helping their academicidea become more global,” says Ito, who joined Creative Commons as a boardmember in 2003, becoming its CEO in 2008. He now chairs the company, whichprovides “a ‘some rights reserved’ approach to copyright,” as its websiteexplains. Ito promoted and expanded Creative Commons across the globe duringhis time as CEO. Now Al Jazeera, the White House, Wikipedia, and Google allrelease material under the company’s licenses. This year’s Creative CommonsGlobal Summit will be held in Warsaw, Poland, in September.

Also in September, Ito will become the MIT Media Lab’s fourth director. Thelab—which is host to scientists, engineers, and designers working on some 350different projects—is "incredibly interdisciplinary,” he says. “There’s agreat impact on the world with the work that’s being done there. We come upwith solutions to a lot of problems.”

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Ito is excited about the potential for combining university research “withthe agility and risk-taking approach of Silicon Valley start-ups," he toldthe New York Times in April. The Media Lab’s mission is to apply“unorthodox” research methods to imagine how technology might affect everydaylife. One group, for example, is developing an interface that lets childrenwrite and choreograph stories acted out by robots. Many of the lab’s projectshave seen large-scale success; the lab produced the technology that led toGoogle Street View and the “e-ink” that’s used in e-readers. Commercialproducts such as LEGO’s MindStorms—programmable robotic toys built fromkits—also emerged there.

Moving to Boston for his new appointment will be a transition for the45-year-old Ito, who has lived in Dubai since 2008. He’d moved there to betterunderstand Middle Eastern culture and to gain traction for Creative Commons inthe region. Ito plans to keep his home in Dubai, where he can keep up his scubadiving. In the Middle East, he says, “rather than play golf, people go scubadiving to bond with one another." Ito learned diving quickly, becoming aninstructor in less than a year.

It’s that perpetual desire to keep learning, Ito says, that has gotten himwhere he is. “It’s funny: My sister and I have the same parents, yet she wasvery into formal education and has two PhDs” he says . “And I found that it waseasier to teach myself computers without the formal classroom education.”

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第三篇：一分钟
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今天喝了点酒晕晕的

olivia瓜瓜

【越障2-3】

Supernovae Seed Galaxies with Massive Amounts of Dust
A supernova that went off in 1987 produced large quantities of dust, which may explain why galaxies in the early universe were so dusty

Dust on earthly objects is often an indicator of antiquity. But that is not always the case for cosmic objects, some of which have quite a bit of dust despite their relative youth.

Galaxies out toward the edge of the visible universe, so distant that astronomers see them as they existed less than a billion years after the big bang, seem to already harbor large quantities of interstellar dust. But just how that dust appeared in such a short time remains unsettled.

Now a group of astronomers reports that exploding stars known as supernovae could be a major dust producer in those early galaxies. The researchers based their conclusion on new observations of a recent, relatively nearby supernova whose light first reached Earth on February 23, 1987, from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years away. Known as Supernova 1987A, the stellar cataclysm has provided a unique opportunity for astronomers to watch a supernova's aftermath.

With the help of a new space borne infrared observatory, the European Space Agency's Herschel telescope, Mikako Matsuura of University College London and her colleagues were able to make an accounting of the material ejected during Supernova 1987A. In a study published online July 7 in Science, Matsuura and her co-authors reported that the supernova produced copious amounts of dust grains made of carbon, silicates and possibly iron. The researchers estimated that the supernova ejecta contains, in dust alone, 40 to 70 percent the mass of the sun. (The progenitor star of Supernova 1987A was likely a giant 20 times the sun's mass whose core collapsed, triggering the explosion.)

"What we found is this supernova is making significant amounts of dust using the elements that have formed in the star and during the supernova event," Matsuura says. If supernovae at high redshifts—that is, at great cosmic distances—behave similarly, that could explain why galaxies in the early universe were so dusty, even though those galaxies had not existed long enough to contain so-called asymptotic giant branch, or AGB, stars, another ready source of dust. (AGB stars are aging celestial objects that often shed mass by blowing dust into the interstellar medium.)

"Since the discovery of dusty, high-redshift galaxies, people have been asking, 'Where did this dust come from?'" says study co-author Michael J. Barlow, a UCL astrophysicist. "For high-redshift galaxies—these are galaxies less than a billion years after the big bang—they seem too young to have old stars."

Supernovae had been proposed as another source of interstellar dust, but they are rare at relatively close range, where they can be carefully monitored, and observational evidence was lacking. "Lots of people had these models where you could create dust in these supernovae, but no one had really seen it," says Haley Gomez, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University in Wales who did not contribute to the new study.

Gomez was part of a group that in 2003 reported significant dust production from an older but closer supernova known as Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, which went off in the Milky Way in the 17th century. The remnant of that supernova is still visible, but its proximity actually poses something of a challenge. "The problem with it being in the Milky Way is there's also a lot of other stuff in the Milky Way," Gomez says. "What we interpreted as coming from Cas A could also have come from intervening material."

Further research strengthened the case that Cas A, in fact, produced a large mass of dust, but the case for Supernova 1987A is even more clear-cut and should solidify the supernova-dust connection. Even though Supernova 1987A resides in another galaxy, there is very little dust along the line of sight between Earth and the supernova remnant, allowing researchers a clear view. "This is why this will make a big splash, because it's a confirmed case where there really is no other possibility for it," Gomez says.

Having shown that Supernova 1987A created lots of dust, Matsuura and her colleagues would now like to know the dust's fate over the coming decades. Can it persist long enough in the supernova's violent wake to fill interstellar space? "One of the things is because the supernova happened so recently, we want to see what happens to the dust," she says. "The thing that we want to see is whether the dust can stay around; can the stuff survive the shock waves?"

The question of dust is not just one of interstellar detritus—the particulate debris between stars can eventually become the stuff of life. "One of the reasons why we're interested in dust is it gets incorporated in stars and planetesimals," or planetary building blocks, Barlow says. "The Earth itself is formed from interstellar dust; the elements in our bodies were once in interstellar dust."

Gomez adds, "It's really the building blocks of what goes into planets, asteroids and even us. We all come from the same thing."

五分25秒，按照今天的方法能大致懂，不是囫囵吞枣的考完就好。回去继续复习考试去了，，晚安》
From Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sn1987a-dust

olivia瓜瓜

【速度2-3】

VOA SPECIAL ENGLISH

Fourteen Scientists and Activists Who areChanging the World计时1

STEVE EMBER: I'm Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I'mShirley Griffith with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Every year, theNational Geographic Society honors scientists, wildlife experts and others fortheir work. Each honoree receives a ten thousand dollar award to help them withtheir research and future projects. This week we learn about the latestNational Geographic Emerging Explorers.
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STEVE EMBER: One of thehonorees is searching for life in faraway places.
KEVIN HAND: "The bigpicture for me and many of my colleagues is the search for life beyond Earth.So if we've learned anything about life here on Earth, it's that in generalwhere you find the liquid water, you find life."
STEVE EMBER: That is KevinHand, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who works at the Jet PropulsionLaboratory in California. This lab works with the American space agency onprojects including looking for life in outer space. Kevin Hand is assiting withplans to send an orbital device to Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter. Spaceagency officials hope to launch the device in about twenty-twenty.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Europa iscovered in ice. Under the ice are deep oceans, which could be home to livingorganisms. However, this moon is not easy to explore. Depending on its orbit,Europa can be over nine hundred million kilometers from Earth. Its environmentis freezing, with intense radiation and no atmosphere.
KEVIN HAND: "And when itcomes to actually searching for this life, that's a great challenge. We sendthese robots off as our little planetary emissaries to go and do the science.These robots basically have to take the scientific laboratory with them so theycan do the experiments and chemical analysis on the planets."
(290 words)

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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Kevin Handand coworker Robert Carlson have recreated an environment like Europa in alaboratory to study its conditions. Mister Hand also has visited extreme placeson Earth to see how organisms survive in cold climates. This could help expertsknow what to look for when looking for possible life forms on Europa.
(MUSIC)
STEVE EMBER: The work ofseveral Emerging Explorers aims to improve the lives of people in differentways. Juan Martinez grew up in poverty in the city of Los Angeles. In highschool, he won a trip to learn about nature in the Teton Science Schoolsprogram in Wyoming. He says experiencing the wilderness and mountains changedhis life.
Today, Mister Martinezcampaigns to get young people, especially at-risk youth, interested in natureand the outdoors. He works with groups like the Sierra Club to get young peopleinterested in the environment. And, he heads the Natural Leaders Network of theChildren and Nature Network. The group creates links between environmentalorganizations, businesses, government and individuals to connect children withnature.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: JenniferBurney is an environmental scientist. She has studied links between climatechange, food production and food security. She is especially interested in howpeople can use new technologies to create a better, more sustainable foodsystem.
One of her projects is innorthern Benin. She has worked with the Solar Electric Light Fund to build awater supply system for farming. Energy from the sun provides power for theproject.
(250 words)

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JENNIFER BURNEY: "Thissystem enables farmers to cultivate vegetables year around and to cultivate newtypes of crops and to generally increase the area that they cultivate so theyhave much more food for their home consumption but are also able to sell alarge majority of it and earn income that way.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: JenniferBurney also works with a group in India. They are studying the effects ofreplacing traditional cook stoves with safer, more environmentally-friendlycooking technologies. Traditional cook stoves produce a harmful black smoke.
JENNIFER BURNEY: "Weknow that it is a component of particulate matter which makes people sick, butit's also a very potent climate warming agent."
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Miz Burneysays replacing old stoves with safer ones could have a huge effect on improvinghuman health and slowing climate change.
STEVE EMBER: Palestinian AzizAbu Sarah is a cultural educator who grew up in Jerusalem. After his brotherwas jailed and killed, Mister Abu Sarah was filled with hatred and publiclyacted out his anger. He refused to learn Hebrew, which he considered thelanguage of his enemy. But he knew he would have to learn the language to go tocollege and get a good job in Jerusalem. In Hebrew class, he met Jewish men andwomen who were not soldiers with guns. He learned they were human beings, justlike he is.
Aziz Abu Sarah has spent hiscareer working to break down emotional barriers between Arabs and Jews. In theUnited States, he helps lead the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy andConflict Resolution at George Mason University. He also created a travelcompany that helps bring people to the Middle East for multicultural visits.
(MUSIC)
(286 words)

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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: TwoEmerging Explorers are working to turn waste into a valuable resource.Ecologist Sasha Kramer is helping to fight poverty in Haiti. She also isworking to solve one of the country's environmental problems. Living in Haiti,Sasha Kramer learned that only sixteen percent of Haitians had access totoilets. Many people throw out bodily waste in the ocean, rivers, and emptyareas. She helped create a non-profit organization that helps turn waste intofertilizer. This fertilizer helps improve the quality of Haiti's soil. And ithelps poor farmers increase their harvests.
STEVE EMBER: Ashley Murray isa wastewater engineer living in Ghana. She is working to persuade governmentsthat turning wastewater into clean water can be profitable. She says theprofits made from reusing waste could change waste treatment systems and healtharound the world.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Several ofthe Emerging Explorers are working to protect and explore undeveloped areas.
Ecologist Paula Kahumbu headsan organization called WildlifeDirect, which has offices in Kenya and theUnited States. The organization's website describes over one hundredconservation projects. The goal of WildlifeDirect is to connect scientistsworking to protect the environment with people who want to help. The group alsohelps spread information quickly to raise support during environmental crises.
STEVE EMBER: Tuy Sereivathanais working to save endangered elephants in Cambodia. Up until now, manyCambodians have hunted elephants to protect their land and crops. TuySereivathana works with Cambodians to educate rural populations on how to besuccessful farmers without harming the animals and the areas where they live.The National Geographic Society says his program has been very successful. Buthe says there is still much work to be done in getting government anddevelopers to support growth that does not harm the environment.
(298 words)

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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: AdrianSeymour is an ecologist and filmmaker. He studies the Indonesian population ofa small meat-eating creature called the Malay civet. He says studying creaturesat the top of the food chain can help explain what is happening in the wholeecosystem. He also makes movies about human issues linked to environmentalefforts.
STEVE EMBER: Four EmergingExplorers study creatures. ?a?an ?ekercio?lu is a biology professor at theUniversity of Utah. The Turkish native has studied the effects of environmentalpressures on decreasing bird populations. He helps to show people how importantbirds are for health, farming, and the environment.
Jorn Hurum studies theancient fossil remains of animals in northern Norway. He and his team havefound important fossils of sea reptiles, including several huge creatures thatonce stood over fifteen meters tall. In Germany, he helped unearth a fortyseven million year old fossil of a primate. Jorn Hurum feels strongly aboutmaking his scientific publications available free of cost so that thisknowledge can be seen by everyone.
Dino Martins is a scientistwho studies insects. He studies environments in which bees and otherpollinating insects are threatened. He helps educate farmers and others in eastAfrica about the importance of these insects in food production and how theycan be protected.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: KakaniKatija is a bioengineer who studies the power sources responsible for theocean's movements. Winds and tides drive the oceans, but so do the movements ofswimming animals. Her research shows that the movement of sea creatures has abig effect on climate systems by continuously mixing the seawater. Mixing thewater moves oxygen and nutrients from one layer of water to another.
(283 words)

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第一篇：差三行 第二篇：差一行
第三篇：一分钟
第四篇：差三行
第五篇：差三行  
今天超累的，，但今天有个新的感悟，平时自己读的慢是因为自己一个一个单词的读，其实应该一句话一句话的扫的，最近事情很多，心也不能静下来，希望明天期末考试的初期完毕后，花一段时间静下来，好好的准备一下，思考一下，，加油，也许我还很差，但我相信一颗平静的心，和重复的力量。。。。GMAT我爱你，商学院我爱你，，晚安
                                                                                                                                                                                           5.22/ 23:03

olivia瓜瓜

越障2-1

Desire, democracy and Deleuze/Guattari
Escaping for a while from the suffocating Turkish summer in a beautifully carpeted teashop in Istanbul near the Hagia Sophia, we marvel at the unbelievable flows of energy exuded by one of the most vibrant and variegated cities in the world. It is as if every nook and cranny of this metropolis of 13-million people has been harnessed to capture the attention of visitors, and, of course, their dollars or euros. Istanbul makes Johannesburg look tame, and seems to exemplify the process of energy-flows described by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

Deleuze/Guattari encourage us to stop thinking substantialistically, as if the world comprises discrete entities, unconnected to one another. Following the thinking of Spinoza, and more recentlyBergson, their world is one of perpetual process, where entities and individuals are the illusory productions of flows of desire. What we think of as a concrete individual is a concatenation of what they call desiring machines — eyes, noses, ears, tongues, hands, sexual organs, organs for excretion, and so on.

At any given moment, desiring machines are linked to one another — the hand picks up a teacup, the nose smells the tea aroma, the eyes see its brownish colour — according to the law of binarity, and this extends in all directions, so that multiple connections between desiring machines extend rhizomatically everywhere. The illusion of existing things and individuals arises when a third event interrupts binary couplings: for a moment, intermittently, when flows of desire are interrupted by other such flows (when the eye is attracted by a beautiful woman walking past, and the tea-sipping stops temporarily), and something resembling identity is produced. An undifferentiated thing, seemingly unchanged through time.

They call this illusory entity the body-without-organs, which is unproductive, but itself produced by flows of desire. What Deleuze/Guattari describe here is a process-conception of the world, which is accurate when one is able to suspend all the usual prejudices that construct the world as a collection of objects and bodies. The latter are experienced, after all, in a series of events, all of which are a function of need or desire, but which are endowed with attributes of permanence. (In physics, too, the illusion of things is replaced with the notion of the world as a totality of perpetually transforming energy.)
Interestingly, Deleuze/Guattari see capital as exacerbating the process nature of reality, in so far as it is constantly striving to set free the productive flows of every possible domain of experience. It can only do this by “deterritorialising” these domains — breaking them into different desiring machines, the way that speculators unbundle large unwieldy companies and sell each part for profit, before the parts start functioning again by unleashing new flows of productive desire.

However, capital can only do this in so far as its deterritorialising strategy is matched by the reterritorialisation of society by state bureaucracies and laws which prevent society from collapsing into pure exchanges of energy. Workers and consumers bear the brunt of such an alternating process. They are colonised, first by capital transforming their own desires into exchange value, and secondly, by bureaucracies and laws which restrict the avenues of their flows of desire.

But perhaps the richest hermeneutic potential of Deleuze/Guattari’s process-ontology of desiring-production lies in the political domain, specifically in the understanding of democracy. If democracy is always “still to come” (Derrida), it means that the “deterritorialisation” of the body politic — the breaking up of dormant, torpid political bodies-without-organs, and the liberation of democratic potential in the form of flows of desire — is an urgent imperative, lest the truly democratic potential bound up in torpid representational structures remain untapped forever.

What happened on Tahrir Square recently exemplifies such a setting-free of the desiring-production process of deterritorialisation. By their refusal, even, of elected leaders (which would enable their adversaries to force the process into stagnation), the protesters were able to conduct democracy along the avenues of Deleuze/Guattari’s flows of desiring-production: grouping and regrouping in different configurations from day to day, thus unleashing the democratic power inherent in people considered as concatenations of desiring machines.

By refusing so-called “representative democracy”, with its inherent tendency towards manipulation of the populace, and construing the body politic as an aggregate of desiring machines, the flows of democratising desire can be harnessed against the forces of political and economic repression.

olivia瓜瓜

速度阅读 2-2

What Determines the Price of Gas:
A Visual Guide
ByDerek ThompsonThink the U.S. can drill its way out of expensive gas? Think again

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Gas prices are on a collision path with $4, putting additional burden on an economy that's recovering from a housing bust, credit crunch, and deep recession. What goes into the price of gasoline and why is it rising so fast all of a sudden?

Let's look at the price at the pump. Every year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration breaks down the price of a gallon of gas into four major components: First, there are state and federal gas taxes, which add between 20 and 50 cents to the final price. Second, you have additional costs like distribution, marketing and refining. To turn crude into gasoline and sell it at the pump, the oil has to be refined, shipped by pipeline, loaded into trucks to drive to individual stations, and purchased for resale to the public. Longer shipping routes, more refined gas, and more convenient service station locations are all culprits in higher gas prices.

Fourth, and most importantly, you have the price of crude oil, which has nearly tripled in the last seven years. In 2004, when the average price for crude oil was $37 per barrel, crude composed only 47 percent of the price of regular gasoline. Today, crude is closer to $111 per barrel, composing two-thirds of the price we pay at the pump.


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The price of a barrel has increased from $85 to $110 -- a 30% bump -- in just five months. To find out why, I spoke with several energy experts across Washington to build myself a kind of editorial pie chart. I'm calling it an editorial pie chart because it is based on the experts' opinion rather than a measured impact, but I think it's a useful way to illustrate the relative importance of each factor.


1. The Supply and Demand Factor. Fuel demand from China, India and Brazil -- three countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion -- is the chief factor behind rising prices. China's fuel demand increased 12 percent in 2010. Meanwhile Saudi oil production has fallen, as AEI's Steve Hayward told me. Perhaps the Saudis are pulling back after overstating their reserves, in which case we're in serious trouble. Or perhaps they're accepting higher prices in the short term to spend more money on their people to avoid a Libya-type revolution, in which case the production shortfall should be temporary. Either way, supply matters and there's less of it.

2. The Middle East. Break the past year in gas prices into three phases. First, in the summer and fall of 2010, gas prices were pretty steady around $2.80. Second, beginning in the late fall, they started to climb gradually for six months. Third, since February, they have increased dramatically. What happened in February? Revolutions swept the Middle East, then Libya descended into civil war and its oil production fell by more than 50%. Ongoing uncertainty about the region continues to push up prices.


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3. The Weak Dollar. A falling dollar can be good for Americans. It makes our exports more attractive and imports less attractive, which keeps more money in the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, as the dollar loses value, oil becomes more expensive.

4. The Summer. The EIA estimates that good weather and vacations cause U.S. summer gasoline demand to be 5 percent higher than during the rest of the year. Better weather means more vacations, which means more gasoline use. Think of it as a naturally occurring demand enhancer.

5. The Speculation Factor. Oil speculation -- investors betting up the price of oil in the futures market -- is a controversial factor in rising gas prices, and Hayward doesn't believe it's a deciding factor. Burned by the bust of oil prices in the 2009, it's unlikely that oil speculators are back in the market bidding up the price of crude. But it's a possible, if marginal, factor.

6. The Drill, Drill, Drill Argument. The U.S. can drill all it wants but it's hard to find anybody who expects greater domestic production to move gas prices by more than, say, two percentage points in the next six months. The problem is that the market for oil is global and U.S. supply is too small to make an impact.


Why Big Business Loves Deficits

ByDaniel Indiviglio
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/why-big-business-loves-deficits/241521/

Large corporations will only oppose government spending if it isn't in their favor

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Wall Street and big business desperately want the debt ceiling raised. They understand that a U.S. default would be catastrophic to the economy. But saying that they want the debt ceiling raised is different from saying that they want the U.S. to close its deficits and pay down the national debt. They don't. This might seem surprising to some, but it shouldn't be.
Big business' love of deficits was the subject of David Leonhardt's column today in the New York Times. He says big business lobbyists are part of the reason why cutting the deficit has been so difficult: they don't want the spending cuts that Republicans demand -- and they certainly don't want higher taxes.
Isn't this contradictory? After all, you can't have lots of spending and also very low taxes. That's precisely the attitude that Americans are often chastised over when new polls come out saying that they don't want their taxes raised but they also don't want any expensive entitlement programs to disappear. But in the case of big business, the logic isn't so simple.
Let's say you're a giant multinational conglomerate called Universal Mechanics (UM) that specializes in energy, technology, infrastructure, industrial equipment, and finance. You spend millions of dollars every year lobbying Washington for two reasons: you want tax subsidies and credits to make doing business at home and abroad cheaper, and you want to win contracts for government projects and federal research grants.

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Think about what occurs in each of these scenarios. If your lobbying is effective (and you're spending millions of dollars to make sure that it is), then the tax breaks and subsidies you help to put in place won't benefit everyone: they'll benefit giant corporations like you. This creates a very convenient barrier to competition: firms that don't have your global reach and accounting sophistication won't get the breaks. This provides UM an advantage.  
Of course, those big government contracts benefit you specifically in an even clearer sense: by developing connections in Washington, government spending benefits you far more than the average company -- and certainly more than the average taxpayer. If your lobbyists do their job, then you will obtain billions of dollars in revenue, thanks to those projects and grants.
So you see, efforts to cut deficits are very bad for a corporation like UM. If deficit discussions result in cutting subsidies or tax breaks, then your firm will be more adversely impacted than smaller businesses or average Americans. And spending cuts could also potentially deprive you of gobs of government-provided revenue.
This might be confusing: aren't big corporations all about less government interference? Big business will be against measures that negatively impact their firms more than smaller ones. But big business won't necessarily be against measures that impact smaller firms more than their own.

The key point here is that big business doesn't prefer smaller government. In fact, big government and big business work very well together: lobbyists help politicians get elected and those politicians, in turn, help lobbyists provide their firms a competitive edge. Cutting the size of the government means limiting this cozy relationship.

第一篇：一分钟
第二篇：差两行
第三篇：50秒
第四篇：差一行
第五篇：竟然1分23秒

olivia瓜瓜

【越障1-10】  之前因为无网站没读到。。。囧。。

Today's Topic: Commuting,congestion tolls and the structure of the labour market: Optimal congestionpricing in a wage bargaining model


Congestion is a serious problem in manylarge urban areas throughout the world. In the US, for example, the TexasTransportation Institute reports very high increases in traffic congestion overthe past two decades (Schrank and Lomax, 2002). In Europe, a comparative study offive urban areas, including London, Amsterdam and Brussels, shows a dramaticdecline in average speed over the past decade;marginal external congestioncosts have been estimated to exceed 1 Euro per kilometre in the most congestedcities (De Borger and Proost, 2001). Economists have suggested a largevariety of policy instruments to cope with congestion, andthe use of some formof congestion pricing has gained prominence in the literature (see, among manyothers,[Arnott et al., 1993], [Verhoef et al., 1995], [Mayeres and Proost, 1997] and [Small and Yan, 2001]).1 Congestion taxes are also high on the political agendain several countries, and the first examples of actual implementation areavailable (e.g., Singapore, Trondheim, Stockholm, Oslo and London). In many othercases, road pricing is under serious consideration. In Europe, e.g., this isthe case in the Netherlands and Germany. Similarly,several US states, includingCalifornia, Florida and Texas, are considering congestion pricing.2


The most severe congestion problems aretypically associated with the journey-to-work, and there is some concern aboutthe employment effects of congestion taxes. Not surprisingly, several papershave looked into this issue. For example, Parry and Bento (2001) focused on the interaction betweencongestion taxes and outcomes on the labour market. They analyse the implicationsof a revenue-neutral congestion tax financed by a reduction in the tax onlabour. They show that such a tax reform does not necessarily reduce laboursupply owing to the feedback effects of congestion. In fact, at relatively lowlevels of the transport tax, the employment effects of raising the tax areshown to be positive. Calthrop (2001) extends the model by introducing multipletrip purposes (commuting and non-commuting) and analyses in detail theimplications of the complementarity of commuting with labour supply. Morerecently,Van Dender (2003)developed a detailed numerical model to studyoptimal labour and transport taxes, allowing for multiple trip purposes andtransport modes. He found empirical support for taxing commuting at a lowerrate than non-commuting transport. Finally, both Safirova (2002)and Verhoef (2005)develop general equilibrium models of a monocentric city with endogenous labour supply. The former numerically analyzes theimplications of agglomeration effects and telecommuting for various second-bestpolicies to cope with congestion; the latter studies the welfare effects ofcordon charges and kilometre taxes, and carefully compares results to the first-best.

Although these studies have revealed important new insights, they all assumeperfectly competitive labour markets. This is less than desirable, especiallyin a European context, since in most countries wages and employment levels arethe result of an explicit bargaining process between unions and employerorganisations (see, e.g., Lockwood and Manning,1993). The purpose of this paperis,therefore, to provide a detailed analysis of optimal transport and labourtaxes in a wage bargaining environment.3Indeed, given the close relation between commuting,congestionand the labour market, a relevant question is whether the structure of thelabour market itself has implications for the optimal tax treatment of transportand labour markets. For purposes of concreteness, we focus on aright-to-managesetting in which wages are the result of negotiations between firms and alabour union; employment is then determined by the firm,conditional on thenegotiated wage. We assume that transport trips consist of both commuting andnon-commuting. In this framework, we study the optimal second-best tax problemfaced by a budget-constrained benevolent government that cares about thewell-being of all its citizens (both the employed and people that, for variousreasons, do not work); moreover, it cares about private sector profits. It usestaxes on transport and on labour as the main instruments. We consider both thecase where transport taxes cannot be differentiated according to trip purpose,and the case of optimal tax differentiation between commuting and othertransport.

We obtain several interesting results. First, using two different (butadmittedly highly stylised) labour market settings, we show the relevance ofthe structure of the labour market for optimal taxation of road transport.Where as competitive labour market conditions produce Ramsey-type taxes, wagebargaining implies that optimal transport taxes strongly depend on unionpreferences.Second, wage bargaining implies that exogenous increases incongestion levels and in transport taxes raise negotiated wages and reduceemployment levels.Third, when taxes cannot be differentiated according to trippurpose, we show that the optimal transport tax positively depends on theimpact of congestion on negotiated wages, and negatively on the wage effects ofthe congestion tax itself. Using a specific but standard specification forunion preferences, we find that the transport tax exceeds the marginal externalcongestion cost to the extent that transport flows include demand by people whoare not currently active on the labour market. Finally, if taxes can bedifferentiated according to trip purpose, commuting subsidies — in the sense oflower transport taxes on commuting trips than on non-commuting transport — maybe justified if at least some part of the transport flows are from people thatare inactive on the labour market. This allows shifting the tax burden awayfrom the employed. Moreover,in this case the optimal congestion tax oncommuters is strictly below the marginal external cost.


This paper is related to several strands ofthe literature. First, relaxing the assumptions underlying the earliertransport literature (see the references given above) allows us to preciselyidentify the role of the labour market implications of congestion and congestiontaxes for the optimal tax structure.Second, the paper fits in with the growingliterature on the implications of externality taxation in bargaining models ofthe labour market (see, e.g., [Koskela et al., 1998],[Schneider, 1997], [Holmlund and Kolm, 2000], [Bayindir-Upmann andRaith, 2003]and [Schöb, 2005]). Unlike these models, we explicitly allow theexternality to affect the outcome of the bargaining process. Third, the papercontributes to the literature on the potential desirability of ‘subsidising’commuters, in the sense of allowing tax deductibility of commuting expenses.4Economic arguments in favour include the presence ofdistortionary or suboptimal labour taxes ([Wrede, 2000] and [Van Dender, 2003]), the mobility of firms and households in aspatial economy (Wrede, 2001), and the distribution of landownership acrossincome classes combined with the location of different income groups in anurban area (Borck and Wrede, 2005). This paper reconsiders the issue in awage bargaining framework, capturing the close connection between congestion,commuting and employment.


The paper is organised as follows.To setthe stage, we start in Section 2 with a very simple optimal tax problem oflabour and transport markets in a world without congestion. This allows us toillustrate and intuitively explain the potential importance of the structure ofthe labour market for the optimal tax structure. In Section 3 we then turn to the basic model analysed inthis paper. We study optimal labour and transport taxes in a wage bargainingmodel; both commuting and non-commuting transport contribute to congestion. Theunion cares about both its employed and unemployed members, the firm caresabout profit. We derive and interpret the optimal tax structure for the case ofuniform transport taxes across trip motives. Moreover, we provide a briefcomparison of the results with those derived under competitive labour marketconditions. In Section 4, we analyse optimal tax differentiation betweencommuting and non-commuting transport. Section 5 relaxes some of the strong assumptionsunderlying the model and discusses several extensions. A final sectionsummarises the main findings.

8分49S，学习了，我是学HR的。。。

olivia瓜瓜

进入2 咯  【速度2-1】ECONOMIST系列（1-3） + VOA（4-5）


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New York says "I do"
TIMING is everything. Forty-two years, almost to the day, after the Stonewall riots (often credited as the catalyst of the contemporary gay-rights movement); some 36 hours before the gay-pride march; and two years after a failed attempt, New York became the sixth and most populous state to legalise same-sex marriage. Late Friday night New York's senate passed the Marriage Equality bill by a 33-29 vote. New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, who made gay marriage a top priority of his first term, signed it into law at 11:55 pm. It will go into effect on July 24th.

The Senate is Republican-controlled, and the bill passed when four Republicans joined the 29 Democrats who supported it. One, Mark Grisanti of Buffalo, opposed gay marriage for religious reasons, but could not justify denying equal rights to gay couples. He told his fellow politicians that as a Catholic brought up to think marriage was between a man and woman, he struggled with the decision. "I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage. Who am I to say that someone does not have the same rights that I have with my wife, who I love, or to have the 1,300-plus rights that I share with her?" (Mr Grisanti was referring to the 1,324 state benefits afforded to married couples.) Roy McDonald, another Republican from upstate New York, told reporters on June 16th that he was going to support same-sex marriage, and that everything is not black and white or good and bad. "I'm trying to do the right thing," he said.*
(259 words)

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For months, Mr Cuomo cajoled, pressured, leaned on and in recent weeks enthusiastically negotiated with legislators to get the bill passed. When it did, he called New York a beacon for social justice. Republicans and Democrats agree the bill would not have been passed without Mr Cuomo's guidance. He worked closely with gay-rights groups who spent millions on the advocacy campaign. In 2009 supporters of same-sex marriage were riven by divisions and infighting; this time they worked under a single banner, “New Yorkers United for Marriage", and they worked with Republican consultants. Commercials featuring athletes, politicians and celebrities advocating support for the bill flooded the airwaves. The most effective were the ones starring regular New Yorkers with gay relatives: the parents who wanted their son to marry his long-time partner, a second-world-war veteran who wants to see his grandson marry whomever he wants.  

The 2m energetic onlookers at Sunday’s gay-pride march down Fifth Avenue hugged, hollered, danced and cheered. One onlooker observed, “This year has more energy than other years.”  Loud cheers were directed at an elderly gay couple, sitting in a rickshaw, celebrating 54 years together. Many other couples dressed in bridal gear were greeted enthusiastically by the watching crowd. One happy fellow wore a bridal skirt and a tuxedo jacket. The noise went up several decibels when New York’s police department’s marching band played “Here Comes the Bride”.  The loudest cheers were reserved for Mr Cuomo who was accompanied by Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, who waved a rainbow flag, and by Christine Quinn, the openly gay New York City Council Speaker. Hundreds of marchers carried signs that read “Promise Kept” on one side and “Thank you Governor Cuomo” on the other.
(284 words)

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In 2009, the last time the bill was sent to Albany, it was rejected soundly. Not a single Republican supported it and eight Democrats voted no. One noted that 73% of his constituents were opposed to gay marriage in 2009, but this year 80% supported it. Recent polls show that nearly 60% of New Yorkers are in favour of same-sex marriage. Nationally, the number supporting marriage equality hovers around 50%, but polls also show that a majority of younger voters support it. Success in New York will undoubtedly help give advocates a boost in Oregon, Maine, Washington and Maryland, all of which are considering similar measures.

Essential to New York’s passage were measures exempting religious organisations from having to participate in same-sex marriages and protecting them from discrimination lawsuits. Still, this did not satisfy Catholic leaders. Nicolas DiMarzio, bishop of Queens and Brooklyn, said that “Governor Cuomo has opened a new front in the culture wars that are tearing at the fabric of our nation.” He also called on Catholic schools and parishes to ban gay-marriage supporters from speaking at their events. Timothy Dolan, New York's archbishop, lambasted lawmakers for tampering “with a definition as old as human reason”. But polls show a disconnect between the beliefs of Catholic hierarchy and those of parishioners: a poll taken in May found that 64% of American Catholics say homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared with 58% of all Americans.

Catholic churches will probably remain gay-wedding free for some time, but marriages at restaurants, hotels and catering halls are likely to begin later this summer. And, according to a 2009 report by the New York City comptroller, gay marriages could generate up to $210m for the state's economy over three years.

* Initially we reported Mr McDonald's quote as, "Well, fuck it. I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing." He was directing at least part of that quote to reporters pestering him about same-sex marriage.
(329 words)

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IsNASA’s James Webb Space Telescope a Time Machine?
If you could build a timemachine, what would it look like? Maybe, it should look like a telescope.American scientists are building a space telescope, they hope, will look backover unimaginable distances and time to show the universe close to itsbeginning.
But this distant past willmainly be seen in infrared light. Visible light is just one form of radiation.Today, telescopes take pictures using forms of light hidden from the human eye.
The American space agency,NASA, is now building the largest space telescope ever. The James Webb SpaceTelescope, named after NASA's second director, will have a mirror seven timesthe size of the Hubble Space Telescope.
But it will mainly study theuniverse in infrared light. We usually experience infrared light as heat. But,if you have ever used a TV remote control, you know there are many uses for it.
The James Webb SpaceTelescope is a complex engineering project. It will be huge -- about the sizeof a passenger jet. And it will have to be super-cooled. Because the telescopestudies infrared heat, its mirror must be kept very close to absolute zero.That is minus two hundred seventy-three degrees Celsius.
NASA is building the Webbtelescope at the Goddard Space Center, outside Washington DC. The agency hopesto launch it in twenty-fourteen.
(222 words囧)

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Jonathan Gardner is a projectscientist for the telescope. We asked him how the device can look back in time.
JONATHAN GARNER: "We cansee back in time because light takes time to get from there to here. So, as welook further and further away, it takes longer and longer for the light to getfrom where it's emitted to here and we can actually see backwards in time.
And if you look far enough,you start to approach the event scientists believe gave birth to everything.

JONATHAN GARNER: "We'relooking (at the universe when it was much younger and we're looking) back mostof the way to the Big Bang."
The telescope has threehighly sensitive infrared cameras. But perhaps its most interesting part is thesix-point-five meter wide mirror. Made of light-weight beryllium, the mirror iscovered in gold, and divided into eighteen linked parts.
This powerful scientificinstrument will be available to scientists all over the world.
JONATHAN GARNER: "Anyastronomer, at any university, in any country can write a proposal for whatthey want to do with the telescope."
Jonathan Gardner says the JimWebb Space Telescope will help scientists learn how the first galaxies formedand what they looked like. It may even show things scientists never predicted.
And that's the VOA SpecialEnglish TechnologyReport. written by George Putic. Watch video about the JamesWebb Space Telescope at 51voa.com. I'm Mario Ritter.
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